One occasionally encounters the view that saving faith is a gift from God, and that those who believe are able to do so only because God gave them the faith to do so. The scary correlate of this view is that those who don’t believe are plumb out of luck: God hasn’t seen fit to give them the faith they need.
Several of the contributors to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (= TDNT [compiled in Germany before and after World War II]) operated from the premise that faith is a gift from God, and used that view as a datum in their theological unpacking of word meanings. H. Hanse makes the following remarks in an entry that he contributed to TDNT:
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- [1] H. Hanse, “λαγχάνω,” TDNT 4.1-2, esp. 2. The commitment of the contributors to TDNT to this idea (a commitment grounded in their Lutheran heritage) is shown by Bultmann’s equivocation in his entry on “πιστεύω κτλ.” (TDNT 6.197-228, esp. 219-20). (Bultmann correctly notes that Paul “never describes faith as inspired”!) One would think that today’s NT scholars could see beyond the miscategorization of believing as a work, but that mistake wrecks a number of arguments in a volume of essays that appeared two years ago. See D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid (eds.), Justification and Variegated Nomism, vol. 2: The Paradoxes of Paul (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2004). ↩
- [2] It is true that Heb 12:2 refers to Jesus as “the author and perfecter of our faith.” But Hebrews has in mind Jesus as one who brings us through experiences that help develop our faith in accordance to the natural means of its development (so that, in essence, this verse testifies against the notion that God drops faith in us like we might drop a coin in a vending machine). This is hardly unexpected in a letter that (remarkably) refers to Christ as having “learned obedience” (5:8)! On the other hand, we must ask: Why does Christ upbraid his disciples for having “little faith” in Mark 16:14 (admittedly not original to the gospel), if in fact it’s not their fault that their faith is lacking? ↩
- [3] Bultmann was certainly aware that “faith” is listed as a charism in 1 Corinthians 12, but it is widely recognized that “faith” in that context is not the same thing as saving faith. ↩
